Apple TV television shows out of order?

I had the same problem but it is now fixed. I suppose it was fixed by the latest iTunes update.

I noticed this problem today. I had already updated my iTunes to 10.6.1 and my ATV2 is up to date too. The problem still occurs. I.e.: My shows are not in alphabetical order. Is there something else I should be doing?

I did not have to do anything. I noticed that my shows were out of order and then at some point they were back in order.

Peace,

The iTunes 10.6 update fixed the problem that was being discussed here. Perhaps you are describing something different?

When you say the "shows" are not in alphabetical order can you be more specific? Are these things you've loaded locally (i.e., stream from your computer) vs. purchased from the iTunes Store ... or both? Is it the SHOWS (the headings -- the names of the GROUPS of shows) that are out of order (when ATV's "TV Shows" is listed "By Show")? Or are you saying that the individual titles under a Show Name heading are not in the order you expect?

Thanks for the reply Keriah.

As an example:

1. I have several episodes of The Office Season 5 ripped from DVD.

2. The way I have their filenames is as follows:

"The Office Season 5 Disc 1 Chapter 1"

"The Office Season 5 Disc 2 Chapter 3"

Etc.

3. From my understanding of "alphabetical", the order should follow the above (maybe my understanding is wrong)

4. However when I list them on the TV Shows "The Office" section (I have the name of the show and season number tagged in the info section on iTunes), I get them in Date Added sequence from latest (top) to earliest (bottom).

5. Since I added from disc 1 to 5 it shows as follows:

"The Office Season 5 Disc 2 Chapter 3"

"The Office Season 5 Disc 2 Chapter 2"

"The Office Season 5 Disc 2 Chapter 1" etc

Hope this makes sense.

Yes, it makes sense. (FWIW, be glad -- be very glad -- that you are NOT seeing the original problem that this thread was discussing!! That had to do with the names of what you call the "section" being in rather random order.)

It sounds like you are describing the typical (albeit a bit nonsensical to some) behavior of iTunes and ATV.

On the ATV, under the "Movies" section, if you view "By Genre" then the titles dispalyed are in the alpha order you'd expect: A thru Z. However, it doesn't seem to work that way under the "TV Shows" using its "By Show" tab. There you won't see episodes in A-Z order UNLESS you play around with the Episode # field in iTunes.

I have literally thousands of TV shows so I have given up trying to get the titles to appear in alpha order (A-Z). For only one group have I taken the time to add in an Episode # so that I see the titles in proper order. Here's what that group looks like in my iTunes. Note the Episode # column has values.

Then, when I view the list of episodes for the Midsomer group on the ATV, they ARE listed in true alpha order (or, more specifically, governed by the Episode # value).

Hi Keriah,

I'm not sure if you know of the following script, but it might help you automatically tage the episode #s in sequence:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=setvideokindofselected

Interesting - no, I'd not seen dougscipts. Thanks for sharing the link. (Did setting the Episode # fix your problem?)

Yes it did.

Itunes sorts Movies and TV Shows correctly. The Apple TV 1st gen lists Movies and TV Shows correctly, ie Movies by Show>then alphabetically and TV Shows by Show>Season>Episode.

Using the same iTunes on the same computer, AppleTV 2and 3 and iPhone and iPad with the latest IOS fail to do this. All Movies are listed alpabetically, not by Show and all TV Shows are listed alphabetically but by Season so where in the ATV 1 you might have 'Benidorm' in the root TV Show menu and then five Seasons listed in order and Episodes in order under each season, in all the others you will get five 'Benidorm' entries in the root TV Show menu, one for each season.

It's dead simple to work out that the problem lies with IOS.

Additionally, the latest IOS update, 5.0.1, introduces all sorts of connection problems.

It seems that Apple is the leading company for coming up with a great product and progressively ruining it.

That's 5.1.1 I think.

Tyke999 wrote:

Itunes sorts Movies and TV Shows correctly. The Apple TV 1st gen lists Movies and TV Shows correctly, ie Movies by Show>then alphabetically and TV Shows by Show>Season>Episode.

Oh, I've not looked at the effect of show within movies before. I don't think I've actually got more than one movie from any series but do I take it that you can use this to link say Bond films together without having to prefix them Bond ## ?

As to the sorting issues on ATV does this post offer any workarounds?

tt2

turingtest2 wrote:

... do I take it that you can use this to link say Bond films together without having to prefix them Bond ## ?

Yes but it only applies to the Apple TV 1

Ha, I should know better than to expect any consistency. 😝

tt2

I think it's more of an inconsistency between OS X and iOS rather than between different versions of the Apple TV. It is the iOS versions of the Apple TV that are unable to nest movies into folders designated by shown name, all over iOS devices are incapable of this too.